Review of Gough, _A Good Comrade. János Kádár_Review by Johanna Granville
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Transcript of Review of Gough, _A Good Comrade. János Kádár_Review by Johanna Granville
Copyright: Johanna Granville, review of Roger Gough, A Good Comrade: János
Kádár, Communism and Hungary (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006), in The American
Historical Review, vol. 112, no. 4, (2007): pp. 1280-1283.
- p. 1280 -
How is it possible that the man who swore in 1956 to fight Soviet tanks with his
bare hands and hours later agreed to serve as quisling for a post-invasion regime in
Hungary, a man who 8 years earlier persuaded a friend to confess to imagined
crimes to facilitate his execution, could in 1999 be voted the greatest Hungarian of
the twentieth century and third greatest Hungarian of the entire millennium? How
is it possible that a bastard child, born into poverty, with only eight years of
elementary education, could become the post powerful Hungarian communist leader
for three decades? In A Good Comrade: János Kádár, Communism and Hungary,
Roger Gough shows readers how. Gough, Research Director at the London-based
think tank Policy Exchange, explains how Kádár, born János Csermanek, lived for
the first six years of his life with a foster family, because his mother, a Slovak
peasant (Borbála Csermanek), could not support him. His father refused to
acknowledge the crying infant on his doorstep. When Csermanek moved to
Budapest, he never quite fit in, appearing awkward to city and provincial kids alike.
Blacklisted from his job as a typewriter mechanic at age 14, Csermanek suffered
long bouts of unemployment. Poverty and loneliness bred in him an inferiority
complex and introverted personality. In 1930 or 1931 Csermanek joined the
underground communist movement, which gave him a larger cause and identity.
His illiterate mother and bastardy did not trouble his egalitarian comrades (p. 12).
The author does not state this explicitly, but perhaps due to the lack of a higher,
university-level education, a tendency developed in
- p. 1281 -
Csermanek to focus on what is currently expedient, rather than on what is morally
right. These two factors, opportunism and loyalty to a larger cause helped Kádár
achieve power in the Hungarian communist system. In addition, certain accidents of
history taught Kádár key lessons and catapulted him to power, namely five stints in
prison (1931-1932, 1933-1935, 1937, 1944-1946, 1951-1954), the Nazi-Soviet Pact
(1940), and the end of World War II. During his first experience of torture in 1931-
1932, he betrayed his fellow communist prisoners, thinking he had no choice (p. 12).
Afterwards he was ostracized; they didn’t trust him. From this mistake - and his
error of dissolving the communist party in 1943 - Csermanek learned the
importance of maintaining party unity above all else. According to Gough,
Csermanek’s political isolation ended when Matyás Rákosi, whom he met in 1937 in
the Csillag jail in Szeged, condoned the younger man’s “honest mistake” (p. 14). In
1940, the Comintern decided to re-establish a party organization in Hungary;
Csermanek was available to perform tasks in the underground again and to serve as
a liaison with the legal Social Democrats. In 1945, Csermanek became one of the ten
senior Politburo members elected. He adopted the Hungarian surname Kádár
(“cooper”). Lacking intellectual sophistication, Kádár excelled in organization,
rather than ideology, economics, or agriculture. He identified strict control over the
police force as the party’s key task (p. 26). When instructed by Rákosi to interrogate
László Rajk, whom Kádár envied and resented for taking his job as Budapest
Secretary, Kádár had no qualms (p. 35). Only later, when confronted
- p. 1282 -
with the “physical reality” of what his “specious justifications” entailed, did Kádár
feel guilt; he was allegedly seen vomiting after witnessing the execution (p. 46).
Eighteen months later, Kádár himself was imprisoned for the fifth time. Released in
1954, he still praised Rákosi, again exhibiting his loyalty to a larger cause (p. 67). In
chapters 7 and 8, in which Gough provides a useful day-by-day account of the Soviet
and Hungarian decision-making process in 1956, we see Kádár at the height of his
opportunism. Kádár agreed with Prime Minister Imre Nagy on the need for a full
break with the old Rákosi-Gerő regime after he was appointed the new First
Secretary on October 30, 1956. Chosen suddenly by the Soviet elite to head a
harsher, post-invasion regime, knowing the intervention had already been launched,
Kádár succumbed to a combination of fear and ambition. His belief in party unity
and loyalty to the USSR prevailed. He certainly would not “opt for martyrdom” like
Nagy. As Gough writes, “To view siding with the Soviet Union as a betrayal is to use
a moral calculus alien to Kádár…[T]here was nothing in his thinking that made
Soviet intervention wrong in itself ” (p. 97). As he later warned Alexander Dubček in
1968, Nagy himself had not been a “counter-revolutionary,” but had been
“overtaken by events” (p. 164). Although initially acting as Brezhnev’s “broker and
soft cop” in the 1968 crisis, in contrast to hardliners Ulbricht and Gomułka, Kádár
ultimately joined Warsaw Pact forces in the invasion of Czechoslovakia when
Dubček rejected a call from Brezhnev on July 3 for yet another multilateral meeting
(p. 167). The ever pragmatic Kádár “knew that
- p. 1283 -
Hungarian living standards were dependent on Soviet goodwill” (p. 169). Goulash
communism and the "New Economic Mechanism" (NEM) boosted Kádár’s
popularity by inter alia easing foreign trade restrictions, giving limited freedom to
the workings of the market, and allowing a limited number of small businesses to
operate in the services sector (p. 161). In contrast to the wasteful Ceauşescus of
Romania, Kádár was known for his modest lifestyle, probably stemming from his
poverty in childhood. All I want is “a bed of my own and shoes that don’t leak in the
winter” he once told his girlfriend Piroska (p. 15). Other factors contributing to
Kádár’s popularity include his peaceful abdication (again, in contrast to
Ceauşescu), his sincere regret for the tragedy of 1956, especially regarding Nagy,
and his death just 3 weeks after the reburial of Nagy on June 16, 1989. Key
strengths of Gough’s biography include his lively writing style and extensive use of
documents from Hungarian and U.S. archives, memoirs, and personal interviews. In
short, although rather partial in places, A Good Comrade is a welcome contribution
to the dearth of archive-based biographies of communist leaders, to be read in
conjunction with others, such as János Rainer’s ground-breaking, two-volume study
of Imre Nagy and Robert Levy’s biography of Ana Pauker.